Galaxy of Titans: An Epic Space Opera Series (The Augmented Book 3)

by Ben Hale

  Ero saw the opening and seized it. “I’ll get her back.”

  “You’d better,” Skorn said. “Because Malikin knows her face and will certainly be monitoring the vids. He’s going to find her. And when he does, he’s going to use her to launch an entire fleet against Lumineia.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  Skorn tossed the blue diamond to him. “Don’t forget why Enara died. She made a mistake, and in the Krey Empire, mistakes get us killed.”

  All the excitement that had been building in Ero’s chest lodged in his throat. Ero realized his brother didn’t care about Enara, and would probably consider her an open threat against their plans. He would question why she’d contacted Ero now. He would consider her an enemy. In that moment Ero realized he couldn’t entirely trust Skorn, so he swallowed the truth of what he’d discovered.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll find Siena and bring her back.”

  Skorn sighed and turned back to the hall. “One day we’re going to have to either sell that girl, or kill her. Don’t forget that she’s just too dangerous to keep.”

  “I know,” Ero said, even as he vowed to do neither.

  Skorn paused in the hall, and then looked back. “We’re so close to reaching our goals, brother, but our House has never been more vulnerable. We can’t risk the slightest opening or we’re going to lose everything.”

  “I’ll be more careful.”

  “I need you,” Skorn said softly. “I can’t do this without you.”

  Ero almost told him everything about Enara. But his hesitation cost him, and Skorn left, his footsteps sounding heavy in the hall. Ero decided it was probably for the best, and once he knew more, he could tell Skorn what he’d learned.

  Satisfied with his plan, Ero pocketed the diamond and exited his quarters. He briefly considered taking an augment with him, or maybe a dakorian, but ultimately decided that this was a meeting best done alone. He descended the riser to the ground floor of his home. Departing into the street, he headed to the city’s central Gate.

  The City of Dawn was a far cry from what it had been before. Erlanex had finished the bones of the city, and there were two thousand homes waiting for occupants. Laurik had insisted on Lorenwhite, a high-cost material that had built a beautiful city. Even if Siena killed her before she got the chance to see it.

  They’d hired over two hundred krey in the last six months. Skorn had checked the history of each to verify they were not spies for Malikin. All were outcasts of other krey Houses, or lower nobles that had no hope of rising through the ranks. Skorn and Ero had offered them a position of prominence—with a price. They could not know their destination, and all beamcasts would be monitored for any chance of a leaked secret. Most of the krey had not given it a second thought, and when they learned of the augments, they’d been keen to join in on the experiments. Now the krey performed the tedious work of performing the initial experiment, and then monitoring and interviewing augments after the procedure.

  Ero passed them by and reached the five towers at the heart of the city. Each contained a gravity drive, and collectively they powered the city. The dakorian soldier tasked with guarding the World Gate nodded to Ero. The towering arch represented the only point of egress on the planet, and he was there to prevent anyone from attempting to use the Gate.

  As Ero approached the World Gate, he linked to it using his personal holoview and opened a portal to the Elttium shipyards, the space station overlooking the city-planet where he’d sent Siena. Skorn would probably confirm he’d gone to the same destination, so Ero made sure to leave the same trail. The Gate powered up and he stepped through.

  He exited the teleport inside a space station. Above, there was a great glass dome. The enormous ceiling provided a breathtaking view of the city-planet below. Ero had always thought the Elttium shipyards looked like a spider with the legs curving upward. Hundreds of ships were docked on the legs. Siena and her team were probably in the process of stealing one now.

  The dome itself contained an entire ecosystem. Two miles across, the gardens felt like they were planetside, with lush vegetation and open-roofed restaurants. The Elttium shipyards catered to the wealthy and elite, and most of the ships were expensive. It was a display station, where potential buyers browsed the latest models.

  Ero joined a group of buyers that were just leaving a restaurant. They were from House Mor’Val, their color-changing eyes bright with excitement as the seller from House Kel’Ray directed them to one of the station’s arms.

  “As you’ll see, the new Annah class is an upgrade on the Roque class, with an enhanced hull, Mark XVII shielding, and a narrower profile. It features two onboard . . .”

  The group stood on an enormous riser and rose into the station’s seventh arm. The clear walls offered a view of several passing ships with polished, gleaming hulls as they plummeted down the shaft. The buyers crowded at the window, those with less authority making way for the higher-ranked nobles.

  They passed several smaller ships before slowing in front of a beautiful vessel. It looked like a claw, with one wing much larger than the other. Obviously designed to appeal to those looking to stand out, it made Ero snort in disgust.

  A nearby krey noticed him and frowned. “You do not like it?”

  “Is a roak ugly?”

  The woman stared at him, sniffed, and then joined the rest of the group as they disembarked the riser and entered the starship. Glass, infused with liquid that gradually morphed from amber to blue, formed most of the walls. The interior of the giant claw overlooked a vacuum in space, where the gravity drive floated outside the ship. The engine was housed in its own pulsing sphere, with artistic mercury flows that swirled around it in mesmerizing patterns. The polished viewing room even smelled new.

  When they passed the Gate Chamber onboard the ship, Ero ducked away from the group and slipped inside. There he used his holoview to activate the system—a simple task, given that the Gate had yet to be slaved to the primary ship’s cortex. As such, it was an unlinked Gate, making it impossible to trace. Just to be safe, he left a burning code that would eradicate the trace evidence of its use. Then he settled in to wait.

  The Gate Chamber was small, but the large, mercury-based windows reflected the giant window on the outer curve. From it, Ero could see several of the other appendages to the shipyard. He couldn’t see the numbers with the distance, so he used his holoview to bring the distant text into focus. He located the third shaft and followed it upward to the ship he’d told Siena to steal. It was last on the leg of obviously cheaper models, retrofits, and older classes. The junk. But the ship on the end put them to shame. It had twin wings that hooked forward, with a center fuselage that extended forward to a point. With the holo magnifying his vision, he could just make out a tiny shape crawling on the outside of the ship.

  “That girl is too bold for her own good,” he said, chuckling under his breath. “And where did she get an exo?”

  Siena had probably managed to breach the ship’s shields and enter through an exterior airlock, or, more likely, Kensen had briefly disengaged the shields. Whatever they had done abruptly triggered an alert, and alarms erupted across the station. Ero turned away from the window.

  He would need to thank her for the distraction, which allowed him to power up the Gate. This would’ve caused the alarm to trigger, but it was already going off, and other starships were powering up in pursuit. No one would think twice about a power surge from a docked ship during the chaos. Ero input the coordinates Enara had given him and, without hesitation, stepped through the teleport.

  After all the noise at the shipyards, the silence was deafening. He was on an asteroid drifting through deep space. The rock beneath his feet was rust-colored and probably iron-based. It had been cut to provide a roughly smooth surface between the Gate he’d exited, and the Gate twenty feet across from him. Both were hidden inside a shield, and the only other thing on the asteroid was the gravity drive that powered th
e Gates.

  Ero recognized it as an anonymous waypoint, usually called a darklink. Used by smugglers and criminals, it prevented tracking by rivals, other criminals, Rangers, or even the Imperial military. He stepped off the first Gate platform and walked to the second. As he approached, a holo appeared and requested a destination. He didn’t have another, so he pulled out the blue diamond and lifted it to the line of text.

  The letters flickered, and small lines of code pulled off the text and reformed into a new set of coordinates. The Gate accepted them and began to power up. Feeling more excited and apprehensive by the second, Ero approached the second Gate and stepped into the portal.

  He exited onto the dark side of a planet. A trio of moons hovered in the sky, two crescent, one nearly full. The air was cool, and plants grew on the fringes of the platform, which overlooked the ruins of a sprawling city.

  Ero approached the edge and eyed the ruins. Steeped in shadows and overgrown with trees, the city was enormous, and stretched across an extensive plateau. Mountain peaks rose in the distance, and a gurgling stream flowed where the occupants had once walked.

  A shadow detached itself from the nearby trees, appearing so suddenly that Ero jumped and retreated a step. The figure advanced with measured strides and reached up to remove a cowl over their head. Bright blue eyes looked back at him from a face he recognized.

  “Enara?” he breathed.

  She smiled faintly. “Hello, little brother. I’m sure you have a lot of—”

  He closed the gap in a rush and engulfed his sister in a crushing embrace. She recoiled at first, and then hugged him back. Krey were not prone to outbursts of affection, but Ero could not contain his excitement. When he pulled back, his sister stared at him with an upraised eyebrow.

  “I thought you’d be angry.”

  “Why?” he asked. “I found out someone I liked is alive.”

  She gave a wry smile. “You were always different from the rest of our race.”

  “Because I hug my sister?” He couldn’t stop smiling.

  “Because you care,” she said simply.

  “Skorn says the same thing. He says I trust too easily.”

  “You always did.”

  He scanned her features, but in the darkness all he could see was her eyes and hair color. It was definitely Enara. Even after all these years, her lips still seemed to carry a perpetual amusement. All at once, the questions bubbled to the surface.

  “But how? They found your body. And why keep a secret for so long? Or reveal yourself now?”

  She smiled faintly. “How about I answer the last question first.”

  “As long as you answer them all,” he countered.

  Her smile widened, and she turned to the city. “The reason I revealed myself now is to show you this.”

  “The ruins of a city?” he asked, and then he noticed the stars. “Wait, I don’t recognize the constellations. Where are we?”

  “Outside the Krey Empire,” she replied. “This planet is called New Haven, and sits at the furthest reach of the galaxy. This city, and others on the planet, were built by humans without the knowledge of the Krey Empire.”

  “Wait,” Ero said, “you mean they were free?”

  She nodded. “They rebelled against their krey owners and killed them. Then they found their way here. They lived in harmony for over twenty thousand years, until they went to war with each other. The ensuing conflict left millions dead, and the planet all but desolate.”

  “What does this have to do with you?” Ero asked. “And why come out of hiding to show me these ruins?”

  “Because”—she rotated to face him, her expression sober—“the humans that settled this planet were not normal humans. They were augments.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Mora love cheese,” Mora squealed.

  Reklin smiled as the young dakorian used the synthesizer to create the thirty-seventh variety of cheese. Mora had bombarded the single dakorian guard with requests until he’d gotten permission to put a food synthesizer into the cell. Reklin guessed he’d just wanted a reprieve from Mora’s constant jabbering, but the girl had burned through six protein supply tubes in a single day, and food was now piled around the room.

  “It’s delrumilous.”

  Mora beamed as she chomped on her latest creation, a blend of two cheeses that was so spicy Reklin’s tongue was still burning. He knew Visika had kidnapped Mora to ensure his obedience, but he could not deny that he enjoyed the time with her. The girl brought a constant smile to his face, even if it was impossible to get the truth from such an energetic whelp.

  “Tell me again what happened when they came for you?”

  “Again?” She groaned and flopped onto the floor. On her back, she continued to eat. “I already tell story.”

  “I know,” Reklin said. “Will you tell me again?”

  She tossed a piece of cheese into the air, high enough to touch the ceiling. It came back down and fell into her open mouth. She chewed happily, seemingly oblivious to Reklin’s amusement.

  “They attack night. I dragged from bed. I kicked and bit. Then hit head.”

  Reklin sighed. He’d tried to ask Mora in various ways, but it seemed the story truly was that simple: She’d been dragged from her bed and knocked out. Then she’d woken up in the cell. Her little three-year-old mind couldn’t comprehend anything else.

  “Where my Seena?” she asked.

  Reklin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “I miss my Seena.” Mora sat up, looking so forlorn that Reklin laughed.

  “I bet she’s on her way to us right now,” he said.

  Mora eyed Reklin. “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  The door shield abruptly wavered and extinguished. Visika stood in the opening, along with Gellow and a krey Reklin did not recognize. Mora spotted them, and without hesitation hurled the cheese at Visika. Obviously unprepared for the edible assault, Visika flinched as the cheese hit her in the face. The food splattered against her cheek before flopping to the ground.

  Reklin sucked in his breath and pulled Mora away from the door, but the defiant-looking girl just struggled to pick up more food.

  Visika wiped her face and glared at the guard. “Remove the food synthesizer.”

  The guard groaned heavily. “Can I at least mute the cell?”

  “No,” Visika said. “Reklin, come with me.”

  Mora jumped for Visika, her fingers outstretched like she intended to claw at the powerful dakorian. Reklin put himself between them and knelt. It took three tries to get the three-year-old soldier to be still.

  “I need you to stay here,” Reklin said softly. “I promise I’ll be back.”

  Mora’s eyes narrowed. “Dakorians not lie.”

  “Trust me.”

  She glared at him and folded her arms. He eased backward and stepped into the open. The guard re-engaged the shield, but Mora stayed in place, her body rigid as she fixed the shield with a baleful look.

  “The whelp is forceful,” Visika said. “I’ve never seen Hest get so flustered with any prisoner.”

  The guard flushed crimson. Reklin grinned at the dakorian’s consternation. Mora had an endless supply of energy and fury, and she’d unleashed both on the hapless guard. Even outside the cell, he’d listened to the bored girl until he’d broken down and given her something to play with. He couldn’t know what Reklin had taken from the machine.

  “Where are we going?” Reklin asked.

  “You and I are going to pay a visit to a contact,” she said. “We will be posing as guards to an outcast krey that recently joined himself with House Bright’Lor. I’m sure you remember Niset?”

  The golden-eyed krey offered a wry smile. “Captain,” he greeted.

  With a start, Reklin realized he did know the krey. It was Niset, but aside from the golden eyes, Reklin’s former prisoner friend looked nothing like the desperate captive of the Burning Ghosts. He stood tall and confident, his features
betraying a malevolent intelligence that set Reklin on edge.

  “Niset is a chameleon,” she said. “Give him a few hours and he can become virtually anyone.”

  “I once convinced a trio of nobles I was the Emperor himself,” Niset said. “Contracts are so easy to obtain when one has the right face.”

  Reklin had met krey like Niset before. Skilled in deception, subterfuge, and sabotage, they were the krey version of an elite soldier. Unlike dakorians, who were trained to fight and kill, krey like Niset were spies and assassins, capable of shedding identities as easily as a worn cloak.

  “Is Niset even your real name?” Reklin asked.

  The krey smirked. “Actually, it’s Enix.”

  “Of course it is,” Reklin said.

  “I must admit you surprised me,” Enix said. “It’s been a long time since a dakorian saw through one of my identities.”

  “We’re not all stupid grunts.”

  “Indeed,” Visika said.

  “I still think we need to shackle Reklin,” Gellow said.

  “Nonsense.” Visika waved airily. “Reklin will be perfectly obedient as long as we have Mora.”

  Reklin bared his teeth at Gellow, then muttered under his breath, “What do you expect me to do?”

  “You’ll find out when we arrive. Enix, get him ready.”

  “This way,” Enix said.

  Visika disappeared down another corridor. Scowling, Gellow followed her. With no other option, Reklin followed Enix to the belly of the ship. This was Reklin’s first chance to see the ship, and he took full advantage. He constantly scanned the corridors and compartments, noting their location and purpose. Before becoming an augment he could have recalled many of the important pieces of information, such as enemy strength, weapon locations, and places of escape. Now he could recall everything, right down to codes input by a krey as they opened a door down the hall. He filed everything away for future use.

  Inwardly he wanted to laugh. He’d served the krey military for a hundred and fifty years, and the entire time he’d never been taught how to operate krey starships or write substrate coding for cortex crystals. Now he was learning it simply by observation.